Color by Number: Coloring Book review

Emily Siegel

2018-08-18

Professional Critic

Emily Siegel

Color by Number: Coloring Book review

2018-08-18

Review Standarts

Our main goal is to provide full and useful app reviews. Our authors strictly follow the rules: minimum 15 hours of the real app usage experience or gameplay, test on main Android and iOS versions, test on phones and tablets.

Coloring books have been among kids’ best amusements for long – for decades, or for centuries. But they always had one weakness: all of the paper coloring books are for single use. Digital coloring pictures don’t have this drawback, so you can use them for as many times as you wish.

The app is available for iOS (the same app for iPhone and iPad) and Android.

Plot — 5/5

Like in paper coloring books, it’s all about accuracy. All you have to do is select the color below by its number and apply it to all the cells with the same number. When you’re done applying, the app informs you about it with ticking the box where you finished. To get the picture fully colorized, you need to apply all the colors to cells with the same number.

You can use a stylus (if your device supports it) or do it just with your finger. The latter option looks like more XXI, but the former will let you recollect those feelings from analog childhood.

The app has a lot of images to offer. Some are simple to colorize, and some require much time and accuracy. You can even generate your own colorizables.

Visuals — 5/5

If the app’s mission is imitating paper coloring books, it does this greatly. The colors are easily distinguishable. The numbers can be seen through transparent colors or hidden by thick paint. The images can be zoomed in and out, and their selection is quite good.

The preview of the camera when you’re making your own coloring book is monochrome and made of squares, so that you can preview your future page in real time.

It’s the case the app looks much better on iPad, as size matters. Anyway, if you have a large screen iPhone, the experience won’t differ that much from iPad Mini.

Replay value — 5/5

It’s a multiple use coloring book. After you finished coloring a pattern, you can save it or share it on your social media. And then start again, as your progress is nulled. And you can return to it later, after handling some other pictures. Thank the developers; the app has a lot of them to offer.

You can even take a picture with your device camera and generate a colorable image from it. That makes its replayability virtually infinite.

Controls — 4/5

The game is full of different tools for coloring single cells or domains. Just tap a color to select it, then tap a cell to color it. If you tap and move your finger, you color all the cells you pass. You can use tools like the bucket to color whole clusters of the same number with one move. But bucket usage is limited; if you want to have more buckets, purchase them.

Anyway, the basic moves mentioned above are free and unlimited. If you stick to these manual methods, you can color all you see.

There are things hard to understand, like the developers’ policy about removing tools. Eraser used to be present in this app, but once it was removed. The automatic scroll is another controversial innovation that was not approved by users. But still, it’s there. If you started with it here, it’s OK for you; but those who have to change their habits have their right to express their disappointment.

Conclusion

It’s a traditional amusement and edutainment for children, yet it’s as good for adults as an anti-stress method. The app is not the only one of its sort, but certainly among the best. Its option of making coloring pages out of your own photos makes it inexhaustible, even when you’re out of preinstalled images.

Joy for kids and meditation for adults, this app is the one you’d want to have on your device sometimes, whoever you are.

Cons:

Too many restrictions and paid features

Updates change tools (for example, one of the updates removed the erasing tool).

Pros:

Easy controls

Good selection of images to color, from simplest to rather sophisticated